4 ms·

my win95 clone menu works just fine, thanks. go reinvent something else.

by nol13 9y ago

majewsky 9y ago
This is being down-voted, but it's a relevant point. The cascading-menu style of application launchers is from the 90s, yet is still very common for lack of a better method of offering access to a potentially very large number of applications. If you think about it, even the homescreen of Android or iOS is basically the same, although of course optimized for a touch interface. You have a long list of apps, and you can group them into folders that open when you tap on them, same as how a cascading menu opens when you hover its entry. The only difference to the launchers included in Plasma is that folders on Android/iOS are created and managed entirely by the user, whereas Plasma insists on using the application metadata to group stuff together. Is there any other way? The only thing I can think of right now is search (either via text or voice; all launchers in Plasma have text search over name and description, so they're good there) and whatever the commandline does... Stack Overflow, I guess? :)
- nol13 9y ago
  ya, having to jump back and forth between the current 'usable' DE over the years had made me somewhat salty on this point.
- pbhjpbhj 9y ago
  >all launchers in Plasma have text search over name and description, so they're good there // I find this a bit lacking, for example there's a lot more apps listed under "audio" than "sound" yet for menu purposes, particularly discoverability, they should be treated as synonyms; one can't be expected to remember the precise adjective/noun used in an app description. The thing I'd most like for the plasma menu is just to be able to alter it's size, corner drag hasn't existed in KDE menu for a long time now. I do a config file fix, which gets overwritten every update.
  - toyg 9y ago
    > "audio" than "sound" yet for menu purposes, particularly discoverability, they should be treated as synonyms The answer for that has been staring us in the face since the 80s: good icons. I shouldn't have to navigate words, I should be able to navigate concepts and intuitions through icons that work at subliminal level. But good icons require good icon designers, which are few and far between; they require icon designer to work closely and in harmony with UI designers and developers, which is challenging; and they require a shared body of iconographic culture that is often impossible to achieve (e.g. a "rescue" concept could use a red cross in Europe / Americas / Australia, but it would have to be different in other continents).
    - majewsky 9y ago
      That brings you to the mess that is mobile app launchers. The problem is not whether the cue is visual or textual, the problem is that were cannot all agree on how to categorise thousands of apps in a way that is useful to all of us.
      - toyg 9y ago
        > the mess that is mobile app launchers In the big picture, we've only been trying to do mobile launchers for about 10 years. 10 years after C, we were still very far from getting Python; it doesn't mean we should have stopped trying to make better high-level languages. I still think a purely-icon-based approach, possibly augmented with optional search, is the best option. IMHO Apple got it almost right with desktop Launchpad. Yeah, it takes the whole screen, but the human mind is single-task oriented - while you are launching an app you are not trying to also type out a document exactly at the same time, fullscreen is fine as long as it's dealt with it quickly enough to reduce the overall interruption to a minimum. Where launchpad fails is in having groups shown as a collection of miniaturized icons with associated (small) text, which is hard to grasp at a glance. It would be better if I could associate an icon to the group, maybe having it automatically suggested when you create the group. > the problem is that were cannot all agree on how to categorise thousands of apps I partially agree, but realistically speaking we've been failing to solve the taxonomy problem with documents for 50 years and we're still nowhere near having a solution (folders, tags, views, colors, whatever - someone will always disagree). I don't think we can (or should) wait for that to change before we can attack this problem.
- digi_owl 9y ago
  That gets me thinking. The touch screen launcher system is a throwback to even before Windows 95, and to Windows 3.x or even earlier, never mind the likes of Mac or Amiga. Back then you didn't have menus, you had nested folders (kinda made more sense on the Mac and Amiga where you were browsing actual floppy content rather than a HDD). The Windows 95 menu was basically a translation of that folder tree into a menu (you could even right click the start button and have explorer open the root folder of that tree). Never mind that back in Win95 the root menu would cascade in columns rightwards based on screen height (and resolution). I think it was either the IE addon pack or Windows 98 that gave us the scrollable single column pr depth menu.
topspin 9y ago
Indeed. Reading this makes me suspect someone is planning to 'fix' KDE with something that will inevitably end up being awkward, expensive and take five years to mature. Unless there is a demonstrably better solution in mind leave the menus alone. Every attempt to supplant traditional menus that I have experienced has only created obscurity, added weight and fueled no end of animosity. I hate to take a bad attitude towards someone's inspiration and well meaning intentions, but the users of open source desktop environments (and proprietary ones for that matter) have endured a lot of iconoclasts, and I don't see that it has achieved much. If your plans are demonstrably better they'll take hold among the enthusiasts and spread beyond without writing think pieces to promote them. Otherwise, should you instead choose to foist your plans on the innocent, be prepared to live in a furnace for about a decade. Right or wrong that is what you can expect.

my win95 clone menu works just fine, thanks. go reinvent something else.

by nol13 9y ago

my win95 clone menu works just fine, thanks. go reinvent something else.

This is being down-voted, but it's a relevant point. The cascading-menu style of application launchers is from the 90s, yet is still very common for lack of a better method of offering access to a potentially very large number of applications. If you think about it, even the homescreen of Android or iOS is basically the same, although of course optimized for a touch interface. You have a long list of apps, and you can group them into folders that open when you tap on them, same as how a cascading menu opens when you hover its entry. The only difference to the launchers included in Plasma is that folders on Android/iOS are created and managed entirely by the user, whereas Plasma insists on using the application metadata to group stuff together. Is there any other way? The only thing I can think of right now is search (either via text or voice; all launchers in Plasma have text search over name and description, so they're good there) and whatever the commandline does... Stack Overflow, I guess? :)

nol13 9y ago
ya, having to jump back and forth between the current 'usable' DE over the years had made me somewhat salty on this point.
pbhjpbhj 9y ago
>all launchers in Plasma have text search over name and description, so they're good there // I find this a bit lacking, for example there's a lot more apps listed under "audio" than "sound" yet for menu purposes, particularly discoverability, they should be treated as synonyms; one can't be expected to remember the precise adjective/noun used in an app description. The thing I'd most like for the plasma menu is just to be able to alter it's size, corner drag hasn't existed in KDE menu for a long time now. I do a config file fix, which gets overwritten every update.
- toyg 9y ago
  > "audio" than "sound" yet for menu purposes, particularly discoverability, they should be treated as synonyms The answer for that has been staring us in the face since the 80s: good icons. I shouldn't have to navigate words, I should be able to navigate concepts and intuitions through icons that work at subliminal level. But good icons require good icon designers, which are few and far between; they require icon designer to work closely and in harmony with UI designers and developers, which is challenging; and they require a shared body of iconographic culture that is often impossible to achieve (e.g. a "rescue" concept could use a red cross in Europe / Americas / Australia, but it would have to be different in other continents).
  - majewsky 9y ago
    That brings you to the mess that is mobile app launchers. The problem is not whether the cue is visual or textual, the problem is that were cannot all agree on how to categorise thousands of apps in a way that is useful to all of us.
    - toyg 9y ago
      > the mess that is mobile app launchers In the big picture, we've only been trying to do mobile launchers for about 10 years. 10 years after C, we were still very far from getting Python; it doesn't mean we should have stopped trying to make better high-level languages. I still think a purely-icon-based approach, possibly augmented with optional search, is the best option. IMHO Apple got it almost right with desktop Launchpad. Yeah, it takes the whole screen, but the human mind is single-task oriented - while you are launching an app you are not trying to also type out a document exactly at the same time, fullscreen is fine as long as it's dealt with it quickly enough to reduce the overall interruption to a minimum. Where launchpad fails is in having groups shown as a collection of miniaturized icons with associated (small) text, which is hard to grasp at a glance. It would be better if I could associate an icon to the group, maybe having it automatically suggested when you create the group. > the problem is that were cannot all agree on how to categorise thousands of apps I partially agree, but realistically speaking we've been failing to solve the taxonomy problem with documents for 50 years and we're still nowhere near having a solution (folders, tags, views, colors, whatever - someone will always disagree). I don't think we can (or should) wait for that to change before we can attack this problem.
digi_owl 9y ago
That gets me thinking. The touch screen launcher system is a throwback to even before Windows 95, and to Windows 3.x or even earlier, never mind the likes of Mac or Amiga. Back then you didn't have menus, you had nested folders (kinda made more sense on the Mac and Amiga where you were browsing actual floppy content rather than a HDD). The Windows 95 menu was basically a translation of that folder tree into a menu (you could even right click the start button and have explorer open the root folder of that tree). Never mind that back in Win95 the root menu would cascade in columns rightwards based on screen height (and resolution). I think it was either the IE addon pack or Windows 98 that gave us the scrollable single column pr depth menu.

topspin 9y ago

Indeed. Reading this makes me suspect someone is planning to 'fix' KDE with something that will inevitably end up being awkward, expensive and take five years to mature. Unless there is a demonstrably better solution in mind leave the menus alone. Every attempt to supplant traditional menus that I have experienced has only created obscurity, added weight and fueled no end of animosity. I hate to take a bad attitude towards someone's inspiration and well meaning intentions, but the users of open source desktop environments (and proprietary ones for that matter) have endured a lot of iconoclasts, and I don't see that it has achieved much. If your plans are demonstrably better they'll take hold among the enthusiasts and spread beyond without writing think pieces to promote them. Otherwise, should you instead choose to foist your plans on the innocent, be prepared to live in a furnace for about a decade. Right or wrong that is what you can expect.